Bunkers & Badasses Deluxe Edition review — Borderlands, for better and worse

Bunkers & Badasses Deluxe Edition is a surprisingly high quality release for fans of Borderlands. If that sounds like a back-handed compliment, it’s only because this review comes out at a difficult time for the franchise. It’s been a while since an official game release, and though Borderlands 3 sold well, its writing was a massive step down in quality from the franchise’s long-passed days of popularity, and even in its heyday the humor was always inconsistent and juvenile. The movie was a disaster, surprising no one except maybe Eli Roth himself, in a display of such idiocy and arrogance that it feels right at home with AAA studio releases. Despite this dubious pedigree, Bunkers & Badasses combines a lot of thought, quality rules, and mostly top notch components with the series’ signature insufferable writing sensibilities. It’s far more than the perfunctory cash grab that you might expect from a licensed RPG.

B&B sets itself as an RPG that exists within the Borderlands universe; originally written by a corporate wageslave, half of the gimmick is that you have purchased Tiny Tina’s copy, replete with notes, scribbles, and pages shoved into the book. Before getting into the meat of the mechanics and their presentation, it’s worth saying that B&B contains a lot of material that’s worth using in this game or out of it. The $120 price tag is substantial, but reasonably made up for by the contents and quality of material. The box itself is sturdy and well decorated, inside and out. The outside sells its fantasy adventure nature in bold, stark colors, while Tina’s neon pink and green scribbles cover the inside.

The box is thoughtfully constructed, making it easy to store 100 gun cards, specialized dice, 10 Vault Hunter minis, blank note pages and character sheets, 100 enemy standees, and a rules reference screen for the Bunker Master, or BM. The extra sheets come with great notes, rules reminders, and character skill breakdowns, to reference in play. The enemy standees contain a lot of pallet swaps, which are true to gaming but remain a frustrating loss of opportunity. The book itself is of rare high quality, with a textured front, good weight, and pretty effective use of space to teach you the rules.

As far as mechanics are concerned, they are laser focussed on combat, almost totally to the exclusion of anything else. Rest assured, there are generous tables for creating random loot, which you can maximize with the customizable gun cards. Each weapon has special characteristics along with its base damage, but even that has an interesting twist: other than natural 1’s, every attack in the game always hits. Your success on an attack roll corresponds to your gun’s individual threshold, which will tell you how many damage dice, and of what type, you roll. A character’s defense value subtracts from that damage, with Shields and Armor absorbing some before needing to recharging or repair, respectively.

To make a character, you first choose an Archetype from Deadeye (accurate snipers), Elementalist (bonus elemental damage), Enforcer (DPS) and Tank (tank). Archetypes determine your starting attributes, access to certain special abilities, and rewards upon leveling up. Classes contain more special abilities and skill trees. Your attributes are Speed, Damage, Accuracy, and Mastery. The available Skills are Interact, Talk, Insight, Sneak, Search, and Traverse, all deriving from your non-damage attributes in some way. There are ways to gain additional skills, through class abilities or leveling up.

A d20 roll-over system, the base mechanics will be quite familiar to RPG players. With the book’s layout, they don’t take long at all to understand and work with. B&B’s one main gimmick is the Badass Die, an oversized d20 with 3 20s and 3 1s in the place of the other highest/lowest values. Once per day, you can attempt a special maneuver outside of your character’s abilities and announce it, much like a stunt or Mighty Deed from Dungeon Crawl Classics. The BM then sets a difficulty level, and you compare against the roll. Succeeding gives you an extra effect and builds tokens you can use for bonuses or more Badass moves; failing generates tokens as well as Mayhem points that the BM can use against players. This is generally a great idea. It encourages players to take risks and act creatively, giving everyone a reason to try to take the spotlight.

The 3 adventures at the back take up a lot of space, but they’re good examples of how to get into the game, save a lot of prep time, and show how easy it is to use the simplistic monster stats. Bunkers & Badasses is easy to learn from player or BM perspective, and offers great fun with its randomized loot and tactical combat. The many elemental effects from your guns are matched with terrain effects for the BM to enhance encounters, and this is a great starting point for RPG players who want something comprehensive in one box. Overall I count myself impressed with much of the layout, organization, and detail of the mechanics themselves. However, and this is a big however, there is one aspect that draws those considerations down: the intrusive, near-constant additions of Tiny Tina, and the way those jokes impact the game itself. To fully digest that, I have to take us on a brief tangent with my…

Pretentious Diatribe about humor in RPG Sourcebooks

Comedy and RPGs are opposed to one another, but only in context of the rulebook itself. At the table you can be funny, and you often will. However, the RPG rulebook is there to be a technical manual; its success comes from being a succinct explanation of the rules, and a reference resource once you have it at the table. Adding jokes in the middle of all of that frustrates this primary purpose. For instance, one of the potion effects on the BM screen has a joke and then says “Make it up” check to quote directly. No I don’t want a joke and I don’t want to make it up. I’m rolling a random potion and checking the chart because I’m running a game here. You make it up. That’s what I’m paying $120 for. That’s what the BM screen is for. There is something to be said for building tone, but if that tone conflicts with the purpose the book is meant to serve, we have a problem.

For probably the worst example, let’s discuss the death rules. Characters in Borderlands have access to machines that will instantly revive them upon death, for a price so meager it might as well be free. To compensate, B&B grants downed characters temporary or permanent Traumas upon revivification. The difference between them is nebulous, down to whether a death was particularly catastrophic, or if you want to punish the player for something stupid. Yeah that’s how it’s written in the book. Tiny Tina may be a crazed little player-hater, but that isn’t a good look for you with your friends. The book suggests, but doesn’t require, that a character dies with 5 Traumas. That lack of clarity is going to grind some gears, but it’s the Traumas themselves that are the real offenders.

Some, written by the original, fictional author, are fine, like temporary stat penalties or lasting wounds. Tiny Tina’s are awful, unfunny, and actively going to make your game worse if you use them. Here are a few examples:

• Punch every NPC you meet
• Flirt with every NPC you meet
• Talk in a silly voice (character takes damage if the player forgets)
• Find out the player’s least favorite thing and make it the character’s favorite thing. Mention it constantly
• Your character is now 4 years old and talks like it

I don’t want to get started on how badly it could go constantly bringing up something that someone doesn’t like to annoy them, but that’s before the inevitability of a four year old flirting with everyone in the room. You can never outright get rid of That Guy behavior in RPG settings, but it’s a different problem entirely when you bake it into the rules. This is bad. For sure most of the rules and the humor isn’t this egregious, but we’re talking about death rules for a game that’s almost exclusively combat. You’re GOING to run across these. While they might be funny to read during your first time through the book, they won’t be funny at the table.

There’s also the fact that much of the comedy is the kind of low effort stupid that just wasn’t funny to me at all. The kind of thing that changed Borderlands from silly and endearing to insufferable. While I have fond memories of the first two games, I literally turned the character dialogue off for Borderlands 3 because it was so badly written. This is more along those lines than Borderlands 2. Lots of references to butts and farts. Just the lowest possible effort to comply with the writer’s idea of today’s youth. I struggled to enjoy a single one of the many MANY jokes in this book.

That all said, the sheer usefulness of the extra material here makes the deluxe edition much more worth it. If you want the kind of roguelike ridiculous gun-combat on offer here, you can have a great time with the game. Just know that it will take some house-ruling and careful pruning of the text before you can get the best squeeze out of this particular game.

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